For this critical play I played Undertale, a 2015 indie game by Toby Fox. Despite this game’s popularity and cultural significance, I hadn’t actually ever played it until recently, when I purchased it on Steam and played through the game in its entirety. The game is targeted at a broad audience, but is best suited to players that are experienced or at least familiar with common RPG tropes.
Undertale is a very meta game, and by that I mean that much focus is placed on you, the actual player of the game. Undertale plays with your expectations not only of how RPG’s typically work, but how games typically work, and how you choose to play them. One of the first characters you meet in the game is Toriel, who teaches you the basics of the game and introduces you to the world(its a tuToriel), all the while being overprotective of the player and ensuring they face no danger whatsoever. To this extent, Toriel bars you from leaving her home and thus progressing through the game, thus you end up fighting her. This is to be expected, after you’ve completed the tutorial, you have a boss to test your skill. However if you actually beat the boss by fighting her as you might in any other game, she actually dies, and is gone from the story entirely. This makes sense of course, but its not expected, given that she’s a friendly tutorial boss, you would expect defeat to mean she lets you pass. However Undertale subverts this, and in doing so, calls out the player’s assumptions about the game.
Toriel dying after you beat her
After killing her(if that is what you choose to do) another character named Flowey says the following, “I hope you like your choice. After all, it’s not as if you can go back and change it.” This hints at the game, and in particular this character of Flowey being more aware of the player and the underlying mechanics than you might expect. However if you actually do go back and figure out how to spare Toriel, this gets stepped up another level, when Flowey says the following, “I know what you did. You murdered her. And then you went back, because you regretted it.” This makes it clear that player actions, even those of saving and loading, are real in the narrative, and have real narrative consequences. This alters how we see the game by making the game and some of the characters in the game aware of things that would normally be outside the expected magic circle of the game. This doesn’t necessarily pull the player out of the game, or at least not in a bad way, as these elements are effectively incorporated into the larger narrative of the game, thus not breaking the magic circle, but expanding it. From a narrative architecture point of view, the game creates a space that evokes traditional RPG elements and mechanics, but slowly reveals an embedded narrative. The embedded narrative kind of works inverse to a traditional embedded narrative however, as the narrative being pieced together is not a story within the story, it’s the larger narrative of the player and their choices.
Flowey reacting to you changing your past actions
Undertale does this meta-narrative worldbuilding in so many places throughout the game, playing with player expectations about the concepts of not only saving and loading, but also things such as experience, level, combat and even what it means to fully explore a game. All of this serves to set Undertale’s world apart from other games, because it doesn’t just immerse the player, it literally makes them part of the world and story of the game. Since Undertale, there have been many games that play with meta ideas in similar ways(eg. Inscryption, Doki Doki), but Undertale was one of the first and arguably one of the best to do it, and as such will always be beloved by those who played it.
